Pathlab Home Visit Service Back in March, Pathlab sent out a clinical update regarding “Choosing Wisely,” posing a number of questions to Rest Home facilities including: • •
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Whether your patients really need a home visit, or can they be transported to a Pathlab collection room by your facility’s transport? Does your facility have the ability to collect samples and deliver them to Pathlab? If it is an INR - for most people once the INR is stable, the rate of INR testing can be extended to two weekly and then four to six-weekly. In some stable patients the frequency may be extended out to eight weeks. However, people with higher levels of risk, e.g., comorbidities, may need more frequent testing.
Like many Rest Home facilities, Pathlab continue to face ongoing staff availability issues which continues to stretch services. Once more, please consider whether the above is possible for your patients as currently Pathlab still cannot guarantee that one of their team will be able to visit your facility on your allocated day. They will ensure that one of their Patient Services staff will make contact with your team on your allocated day if a visit is not possible. With this in mind, they also ask that you please follow the guidelines Pathlab have in place for this service. •
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Please have your list of patients emailed by no later than 7.30am on the morning of your allocated day (preferably by 4pm the previous day when possible), and where possible, include the patients room number. Please note that it is not the responsibility of the Pathlab Home Visit staff to contact Rest Homes looking for their lists. There is no guarantee that any lists arriving after 7.30am will be completed as Pathlab staff plan their day around these lists. As noted above, the Pathlab Home Visit staff plan their day around the lists supplied from the Rest Homes for any given day, so presenting staff members with additional requests on their arrival (at times multiple requests), is not ideal. Pathlab understands from time to time there may be a need for an urgent request that will require attention and will endeavour to work around this as much as possible, however please contact the lab to notify them if you have an additional collect and please have a request form ready when the staff member arrives. Pathlab understands that on occasions you will have urgent tests required on a day other than your allocated visit day. Please keep these requests to Urgent tests only. This additional service is not for routine lab tests. Please make yourself and your staff aware of Pathlabs home visit criteria - Patients must be bed bound (hospital care or dementia patient) and/or must have impaired mobility - mental or physical. Pathlab does try to be flexible on the day, however with the increasing demands on the service they can no longer guarantee that any patients that fall outside this criteria will be seen during our visit. Lastly, for any patients requiring therapeutic drug monitoring, please make your staff aware of the guidelines around the collection of these specific drug levels e.g., whether the sample needs to be collected at either pre or post dose, or within “certain hours” post dose. This information is available under the Test Index tab on the Pathlab website or by clicking this link Test Guide | Pathlab.
Pathlab will continue to support all communities, but like most healthcare services at this time, they have limited resource and have a high risk of loss of service continuity.